


Empty Space

by titansatemysoul



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Break Up, Erwin-centric, M/M, Rebounding, relationship angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-16 03:28:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8084950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/titansatemysoul/pseuds/titansatemysoul
Summary: Erwin feels weightless, as though he’s free falling, his whole world disintegrating beneath him. It could be the sensation of the wheels leaving the ground as the plane takes off, but an hour later the sensation hasn’t dissipated, and Erwin realizes, his world is gone.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [freckled_krista](https://archiveofourown.org/users/freckled_krista/gifts).



> Written to River of Tears by Alessia Cara

A coaster is forgotten at the other end of the coffee table as Levi sets down his glass with a soft, _clink_.

“Call me when you land,” Levi says, impassive as he stared into an empty kitchen. Everything is clean, organized and in its place, and although there are some key fixtures missing, it looks just the same as the day Erwin moved in. He follows Levi’s gaze, landing on the large chrome refrigerator, littered with magnets that held the photographs of their favorite moments together over the last three years. On the walls, nails sit bare, exposed against eggshell white walls around the house, and there’s a cardboard box, still sitting on the island, the corner of a silver frame poking out of the top. Levi said he’d take them to the basement when Erwin left.

“I probably won’t,” Erwin says, the weight of his carryon straining against his shoulder. Levi’s eyes flick towards him, and for a moment, the mask is down, and Erwin is nearly toppled by the raw emotion that he finds in within pools of gray. “Do you think it’s a good idea to be drinking tonight?”

“I _think_ I can do whatever I want,” Levi snaps, but then the bite in his voice disappears, swallowed with another sip of vodka. Levi doesn’t drink. “Sure as hell ain’t a bad one. Call your dad then, someone’s got to make sure you don’t get kidnapped on your way there.”

“I will,” Erwin says, his heart beating faster as he glances down at the phone in his palm. His Lyft is only two minutes away. “I should go outside.”

Levi finally turns his head to look at him, expression blank, as he sinks into their, _his_ , worn couch.

“I don’t think I’ll walk you out, if that’s alright,” he says, and Erwin can already hear the sounds of rubber against asphalt, pulling up in front of their apartment.

“Oh, that’s alright, I didn’t expect –“

Erwin’s phone vibrates in his hand.

“Go,” Levi says, and there’s an edge in his voice this time. “You don’t want to miss your flight.”

Erwin closes his mouth, checks his breast pocket one last time for his passport and plane ticket. His belongings are already in route to his new apartment, and they’d agreed it didn’t make sense for Erwin to take any of the furniture they’d once picked out together. The moment has arrived, and Erwin doesn’t move, his carryon bag feels like lead, and he struggles to hold on.

“I left my keys on the counter,” he says, because he can’t think of anything else. Erwin can just see Levi leaning forward, shoulders shaking, glass clutched between his thin fingers, as he shuts the door behind him. He can’t bring himself to say the word ‘goodbye’.

Erwin is thankful his driver doesn’t try to talk to him, and if he notices the tears beginning to stain the collar of his button-down shirt, he doesn’t say anything.

This should all be an awful dream, some horrible misunderstanding, Erwin thinks as the car twists and turns around the curved roads of JFK International Airport. It feels wrong, but he gets out at Terminal 4 anyways, and forgets to thank the driver as he climbs out of the car. It’s still only three in the morning, and the terminal is quiet as Erwin steps into the men’s room.

His reflection stares back at him, face blotchy and red, tear stains catching the light on his cheekbones. His clothes are clean, and pressed, his hair is combed and parted, though devoid of its usual product, and the tie Levi bought his last Christmas sits in the center of his chest, and suddenly Erwin feels like its suffocating. He wants to rip it off and throw it away, but he can’t do it, so he settles for loosening its knot around his neck. He arrives at his gate feeling no less stifled.

There’s another hour before boarding, so Erwin buys a breakfast sandwich and settles by the window. He tries to watch the planes as they come and go, tries to shut his brain down, if only for a moment. It doesn’t distract him from checking his phone every five minutes.

Erwin doesn’t know what he’s waiting for, doesn’t know if it’s hope, dread, or delusion that keeps him from letting go. He checks his email, responds to his new employer, informing him of his departure, before pressing the power button. The screen dims, ‘Slide to Power Off’, but instead he taps on ‘Cancel’ and then ‘Messages’.

Levi’s name is still at the top of his conversations. ‘K.’ is the last message, dated two days before. He swipes left, and the ‘Delete’ button appears, bright red and permanent. He should do it now, leave the past in the past, because that’s where Levi belongs now.

Instead he swipes right, and opens the conversation. Erwin scrolls upward, because he knows it will hurt, and that’s better than nothing. It’s full of brief exchanges like ‘pick up milk on the way home’, ‘when are you getting in?’, a few picture messages of cute animals and inside jokes.

He’s almost to the top of the message stream when he finds the last ‘Love you.’

The next section of archived messages begins to load when the attendant is on the loud speaker and Erwin recognizes his flight number being called. He hits the ‘Back’ button, Levi’s name is swiped left, and deleted.

He finds his seat next to an elderly Chinese couple, and he lifts their carryon’s onto the overhead compartment. The man thanks him, and his wife asks where Erwin is headed. He tells them, and they let him practice his butchered Mandarin as the other passenger’s board around them. They tell him it’s not so bad, and Erwin appreciates the lie.

As they turn onto the runway, Erwin watches as the old man covers his wife’s hand with his own. Erwin can see that her knuckles are white, even against her pale skin, fisted in her lap. The plane picks up speed, the engines and propellers roaring to life. The man leans over, and kisses his wife’s temple, and she intertwines her fingers with his.

Erwin feels weightless, as though he’s free falling, his whole world disintegrating beneath him. It could be the sensation of the wheels leaving the ground as the plane takes off, but an hour later the sensation hasn’t dissipated, and Erwin realizes, his world is gone.

\---

There’s a hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently. Erwin frowns, trying to roll over in the other direction, cursing Levi for waking him so early, but there’s something hard and solid pressing into his gut, and the older woman next to him narrowly escapes having her hand crushed against the armrest.

As Erwin’s eyes focus, he realizes that the person shaking him is the flight attendant, who politely tells him to please lift his tray table and his seat into the upright position. Erwin mutters an apology to his seat mates, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he fastens the latch of the table against the seat in front of him.

There’s another flight attendant speaking over the intercom, first in Chinese and then in English. They’re thirty minutes away from Pudong International Airport, and beginning their final descent. Erwin exhales, and pushes up the window cover. The dense atmosphere keeps him from seeing the ground below, just a sea of gray and fog that remind him of what he’s left behind. He looks away, to see the couple beside him, speaking fast and excited, because they’re finally home. As they step off the plane, the air around them is humid and sticky, and a flight attendant wishes Erwin well, but he doesn’t smile in return.

He turns on his phone, and it takes longer than usual for it to find a signal. He unlocks it, and opens up Messages, but he remembers that Levi is already gone, so instead he opens his email, and finds instructions from his new employer.

Erwin ignores the celebrations of reunion around him, eyes forward, shoulder’s squared. There’s a woman waiting, just where the email said she would, holding a sign, “Mr. Smith”.

_Levi laughs._

_“You sound like some fucking assassin you know,” he says jokingly, as he and Erwin stand close in the elevator that_ _’s taking them to their hotel room. They_ _’ve just checked in for a weekend away, because they don_ _’t need an excuse to spend every moment together, but it helps._

The woman however, is not Levi. She holds out a hand, and it takes a second too long for Erwin to realize that he’s meant to take it.

“Erwin Smith,” he says. “And you must be Miss Ral?”

“Petra is fine,” she says smiling, and Erwin suddenly feels just a little bit better. “I have a car waiting to take you to your apartment. Your belongings arrived earlier today.”

By the time they get out of the parking lot, it’s raining harder than Erwin thought possible. Surely it never rained this hard in New York City. Then again, maybe it did. Levi always loved the rain.

It still hasn’t stopped, and Erwin and Petra soak themselves running from the car to the revolving doors of a towering apartment building. Petra pulls her strawberry blonde hair up into a messy knot on the top of her head, and Erwin notices she looks prettier with her make up washed off. She gives him a key and a code, and a brand new company laptop with a decal of the Reiss Group logo.

Erwin offers for her to stay, to dry off and maybe join him for a meal and a drink. Petra politely declines, and Erwin thinks it’s for the best, because he’s in the right kind of mood to do something he regrets.

He’s still considering it an hour later as he walks down the street towards a shopping center that’s bigger than any he’s ever seen. It’s comforting to see the familiar logos and brands from home, but he can’t seem to escape the couples that walk past him, laughing and talking, fingers intertwined. He goes home with a candy bar and bag of chips from the nearest 7Eleven, which he’s surprised to find on the streets of Shanghai.

It starts to rain again just as he steps over the threshold of his building, and Erwin is thankful to be back. The lobby is large, and it’s only now that Erwin notices the entrance to a restaurant attached to the building. He recognizes the name from his information packet left in his apartment, and decides that maybe he needs more than candy and chips.

Luckily the bartender speaks basic English, and the menu has pictures and translations. It seems that whiskey, neat, is universally understood. Erwin tells himself he’ll have two drinks and his dinner, because he has less than 48 hours before his first day at work, and he’s already falling apart, but two hours later he still hasn’t ordered his food, and work is the last thing on his mind.

He’s on his third glass of overpriced whiskey when he hears someone speaking loudly in English and he looks around, the words already foreign in his ears.

“Son ‘f a bitch, this is my best god damn suit!”

He’s shaking his head like a dog, water clinging to his brown hair as he approaches the bar. He takes off his jacket, and Erwin can just see the Armani tag as he drapes it over the back of his chair. His nose looks like it’s been broken one too many times, and his eyes are a deep brown, heavy lidded and Erwin realizes he’s handsome at the same time he realizes he’s probably had too much to drink.

The man is half a dozen seats away from him, speaking fluent Chinese to the bartender, who’s laughing at whatever he was saying. Erwin’s actually jealous, because he’s been studying Chinese for the last two months, and that level of fluency seems unobtainable.

Erwin means to look away but he doesn’t, and when the man notices him, he raises the glass he’s been given as an acknowledgement. The man sets the glass down on the counter with a soft, _clink_ and Erwin feels like he’s been punched in the gut, but mimics’ the gesture. The bartender is there, and the man starts talking to him again, and Erwin returns to his glass, knowing he’ll be sorry he didn’t eat come the morning.

“Is this seat taken?”

Erwin looks up to see the man, bangs stuck haphazardly against his forehead, brushing the very top of his brow. Erwin realizes he’s even more handsome up close, the muscles of his torso and shoulders well defined, obvious through his once crisp white button down, but he just says, “Please,” gesturing at the seat beside him.

“Mike Zacharias,” he says, holding out his hand.

“Erwin Smith,” Erwin says, shaking it. Mike’s hand is larger than is own, still slightly damp, but warm and encompassing around his own. It grounds him.

“You here for business or pleasure?” he asks, casual.

“Uh, business,” Erwin says, because it feels like an odd question but he doesn’t know why. “Just got transferred here.”

“Yeah? Where from?”

“Brooklyn,” Erwin says, and he’s suddenly worried that his drink is about to turn on him.

“Lansing, Michigan,” Mike tells him, even though Erwin hasn’t asked. “Born and raised. What do you do?”

“Accounting,” Erwin tells him, and Mike looks surprised.

“A number cruncher huh? You sure don’t look the taxman.” Mike has shifted to face him in his seat, elbow resting on the counter as he sips his drink.

“Thanks, I guess.” Mike laughs and Erwin isn’t sure whether he should be offended. “I mostly do internal auditing for public companies. What about you?”

Mike drains his glass, and grins at him.

“Head of Global Media, Reiss Group Shanghai,” he tells Erwin.

“Really?” Erwin pauses because hunger is clenching his stomach. “I’m also with Reiss.”

“I figured,” Mike says easily and for some reason it makes Erwin angry. “Reiss owns this entire building, most of our international employees are housed here. It’s not often I see an unfamiliar face.”

“You remember every person you see?” Erwin retorts, and it sounds rude, but Mike just laughs.

“Don’t think I’d forget a face like yours,” he tells him, so earnest that Erwin doesn’t know how to respond.

“I should be getting back upstairs,” he says instead, taking out his wallet, but Mike beats him to it, holding up a solid, black credit card, saying something to the bartender in Mandarin.

“That’s really not necessary,” Erwin tries to say, but Mike is already scrawling his name across the receipt paper.

“Call it a welcome to the building, slash, congratulations on the new job,” he says, and there’s something in his eye that feels familiar, but Erwin can’t put a finger on what it is.

“Well, thank you,” Erwin says, stretching his legs as he stands. “It was nice meeting you.”

He holds out his hand, but Mike shrugs, folding his jacket over his arm.

“I’ll walk you up,” he says, and Erwin can’t do anything but agree. He can feel Mike’s eyes on his back as he walks ahead towards the elevators, and decides that yes, this is most certainly the night for regrets.

Erwin presses floor 14, then Mike, 27. Neither say a word, but Mike has him pressed against the wall, gin soaked tongue tasting whiskey, leg pressed between Erwin’s thighs just as the elevator doors close behind them.

**Author's Note:**

> A cure for writers block from the beginning or summer that freckled_krista has convinced me to post.


End file.
